


Snow in Vermont

by annatorverse



Category: Fringe
Genre: Comfort/Angst, F/M, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-21
Updated: 2014-10-21
Packaged: 2018-02-22 01:53:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2490158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annatorverse/pseuds/annatorverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Taking place after Fringe 4x16, when Peter and Olivia do answer that call from the 1970s. While Peter is ready to embrace the situation wholeheartedly, relaxing never comes naturally to Olivia, who seems to have a lot more on her mind than the occasion calls for. How domestic can it really get for them?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snow in Vermont

**Author's Note:**

> This Fringe fanfic is about Olivia, her undying love for Peter, and how she can embrace the powers of her mind only for the sake of this love. It takes her much pain, however, to be able to accept these powers. Olivia is here portrayed as a counterpart of Michael—like the “child observer,” she is a positive anomaly; as with him, the force of her emotions is what enables her to transcend time and have access to the vital energy that will bring about a better world. And now, this energy begins to nurture the first child to be born of two universes, the little girl who will be needed to save the world from destruction.
> 
> I started writing this story in an apartment I rented for a week’s vacation, and in which the owner had a decorative lamp in the shape of a bunch of white tulips! I took it as a sign it was definitely time for me to write my first serious Fringe fanfic.
> 
> Work in progress. Next chapters should be ready soon, hopefully

_And I think that at the end of the day, what Joel was trying to say is that—there is hope._

**Anna Torv**

 

 

**Chapter 1**

 

“What’s on your mind, honey?” Peter asked gently, as he poured Olivia a glass, trying not to sound over concerned.

 

He had providentially remembered to pack the whiskey with their luggage when they left Boston that morning for the short vacation they had at last gotten around to organizing and, to their surprise, been allowed to actually take. Perhaps the opening of the Bridge between the two universes was finally having some effect on this side too, giving the Fringe Team a measure of respite for the first time in months. Lincoln had gone to see Julie and her kids for the weekend; Astrid had taken an increasingly emancipated Walter out of the lab to meet her own father—no doubt, she thought, the two men would quickly be trading cooking secrets over some cocktail of their common invention! As for Peter and Olivia, after four hours of endlessly winding county roads, they had reached their destination—an out-of-the-way hamlet in South Vermont not even mentioned on the road atlas, which was exactly the reason why Peter had picked it in the first place. That way, not even a rescue party of dogs and men in trench coats could ever find them. And right now, there was nothing he wanted more than being marooned in the middle of nowhere with Olivia all to himself.

After they had collected the keys and settled down in the cozy little wooden cottage they had rented for three days, Peter had put some logs in that fireplace from which the 70s had been insistently calling him. He had been happy to turn Olivia’s joke into a full-fledged project for the two of them, while she was indulging him and his walk down memory lane, even though the prospect of wintering in a secluded house did not really appeal to her. The relief from their daily fare of horrific madness should have begun to feel palpable, by now; and yet, to Olivia, the absolute quiet of the late afternoon shrouding them felt even weirder than the weirdest cases they had ever worked. _Looks like we have lost all notion of what’s a normal life_ , she thought. _At least,_ I _have_ , she corrected herself sadly. _All the others seem perfectly able to fall back into the domestic groove without too much trouble_.

Twilight comes early on the slopes of Vermont, but the gorgeous colors the clear skies take on as the sun goes down amply make up for the shortened days. Had it not been for the freezing winter cold outside, the evening might easily have tricked them onto the porch, where they would have basked in the glory of uninterrupted nature rolling off into the distance.

_Vert Mont_.

The place did more than justice to the State’s French name, and only Olivia’s eyes could match the deep green expanse of primeval pine forest stretching outside their window. Standing there, she watched this jade from her emerald, drifting off in a train of melancholy thoughts. Under her intense gaze, the landscape now slowly yielded to an inscape as her irises sucked in the color of the trees and the trees themselves were becoming the very stuff of her mind.

_I’m in a forest. I can see very tall trees_.

The random thought flashed in her head and felt acutely vivid, relived more than simply remembered. A stab of pain at her left temple made the circumstances of these words cruelly real to her: Jacksonville, Walter strapping her again to a torture chair, trying to activate her ability to see through to another world, the consequences of this reactivation on her relationship with Peter. But even worse, knowing why these words were in her mind did not make it any easier for her to accept them, for the thought jarred against another set of memories and experiences with no Peter in them. This had been happening to her more and more frequently, and frighteningly, over the past few days. The time loops and lapses, jumps and gaps, which they had all recently gone through were nothing compared to the sense of dislocation she was undergoing. Memory replacement, she now realized, was not the smoothly gradual process she had at first believed it would be, but more something of a permanent collision of personalities which exhausted her. And it looked as if eloping to Vermont was not going to help much!

Usually, the great outdoors left her indifferent, for Olivia had always been a city girl. Presently, she vaguely recalled Nina taking her and Rachel up to her house in the Catskills when they were still girls, not long after their mother had died, and how she’d been bored to tears in the interminable silence and vacancy of their days up there. Did that actually happen, though? This hazy stretch of her past extended as if behind a frosted-glass window pane—not unlike the pine-drowned slopes outside, too cold to feel true and just beyond her reach, as though it did not quite belong to her. As though _she_ did not belong in it, or no longer entirely so.

And yet, what if the Catskills were actually the place from which the forest with tall trees had suddenly popped back into her mind? How could she be certain that what had seemed so painfully “real” a moment ago was not actually a delusion and had never happened at all? _Reality is a matter of perception._ But what if you perceive it through two pairs of eyes, and two sets of memories, at the same time? The green forest and the green eyes— which was the image, which the reflection?

Vermont. Vacation. A vacant mind. Or was hers too crowded?

Olivia shivered.

_Am I losing my mind? Am I literally losing bits of my lives from the collision? Will I ever be whole again, with a history of my own that I can recall and tell to myself in order to cohere?_

The bits and pieces of her newfound life remained at odd angles with one another, leaving blanks in her mental map as they did not quite fit in what would have been equivalent stretches of time or series of events in the former version of herself. And even though Peter’s love acted as a sort of bonding agent for her memories to make sense, and for her life to be stitched back together, Olivia could dimly feel that some essential part was still missing to make her complete. She needed something more—a deeper emotional trigger she knew hadn’t been released in her yet, and which would at last allow her to embrace who she truly was.

The self-confidence with which she had told Nina, only a couple of weeks earlier, that she preferred to forsake who she had been for who she was fast becoming, had quickly turned into a nerve-wracking uncertainty. Now she was all confused, as some shreds of her former existence lingered on in her new but still incomplete life—ghosts of a past that, by an odd trick of time, seemed more recent than the present she was experiencing and which was feeling to her like the offshoot of a much more ancient period. It was as though a dormant seed had all of a sudden been revived in the deeper soil of her mind, giving birth to a new flower whose growing vigor required all the others to wilt and die, no matter how bright their bloom had been before, or still was.

_Flowers? Was that the key?_ Olivia had a strong feeling, the strange impression one gets when opening a door to a room for the first time and yet knowing one has been there before, in that very same room. But it eluded her and vanished into a blank space—another ghost.

Was she turning into a freak like Eugene, the test subject they had recently met in a case that she had forced herself to review because she was forgetting its details? Olivia had never been good at accepting her extraordinary powers and she once again ( _why once again?_ she fleetingly wondered) could not help seeing herself as an anomaly. Now, another migraine was beginning to blossom and throb at her temple, reminding her that she, too, like the helpless chameleon young man draining the people he touched of all their color, had been dosed with massive quantities of a powerful drug. Except it was not her _body_ that had become invisible to others, but the mind fueling this body and making her who she was that was now changing colors, playing hide-and-seek with herself.

_Who are you? Where am I?_ the echo of a distant voice asked in her inner ear, so much like hers and yet so different. Hadn’t she also been the person asking those very same questions, in the past? In _a_ past?

 

“Hon?”

Peter’s voice was at her ear now, ringing like a soft bell, as Peter himself stood next to her by the window, finally managing to draw her back to this world with the most loving tone he could muster in this single half word.

“My mind, Peter,” Olivia answered cryptically.

“Yes? That’s what worries me. You’ve seemed a little distracted all day, and the last thing I want you to do is to forget you can relax. That’s why we’ve come up here, you know.”

“I know,” she said half-heartedly, the faintest of smiles fleeting across her lips but not reaching her eyes.

“You _need_ to unwind, Olivia,” he insisted, holding up the glass of whiskey for her to see. But she did not even seemed interested in the drink—not a good sign, he said to himself. “I know you always thought it was a stupidly romantic idea, but bringing you up here was only meant to help you reach some peace of mind—barring the fact that I _am_ a stupidly romantic kind of guy, of course.”

Still, Olivia remained flustered and focused on something he could not perceive. When Peter saw his weak attempt at a light tone fail, his hand reached up to cup her cheek in a caring gesture. “So, why don’t you open up and tell me what’s on it? Your mind?”

“That’s precisely what I’m telling you, Peter, my _mind_ ,” she winced, still looking out the window. “That’s exactly what has been on my mind, to tell you the truth. The way my mind is both mine and not mine at the same time.”

“Now you’re downright frightening me! You start sounding like Walter—you know, this habit he has of saying ‘Two thoughts come to mind’ in the most gruesome situations? Although, ‘Two minds come to thought’ would seem to be more appropriate, in your case!” he quipped.

Olivia could not refrain a real smile, this time, from flashing across her drawn features. Peter was always so good at brightening things up for her. But this—this was serious and she needed him to understand. She turned away from the darkening slopes outside, her eyes brimming with tears.

“Oh, Peter!” she whispered, her right hand already flying up to rummage in her hair. “I don’t understand what’s happening to me any more. I thought I would be able to control things, but I am not. I have the impression I’m two in one, the same and not the same. It’s as if I was stuck permanently on the border between the two universes and was kind of sucked out of myself to vanish in this no-man’s-land.”

“But you said you liked the feeling, remember? Down at the warehouses, you said ‘I like the feeling!’ Remember?” Peter pleaded gently, somewhat puzzled by this change of mood which appeared to set Olivia back to that dreadful time in Westfield, where being stranded in a no-man’s-land between universes had not been a mere figure of speech.

But that was before she started remembering them, he recalled—back in Westfield, she still wanted to know what she was like, the “other Olivia.” This Olivia next to him, however, _his_ Olivia, had seemed willing to accept the complete rewriting of her history and life; she had been ready, even happy, to sacrifice her former self for the sake of her unconditional love for him. What indeed _was_ happening to her? Peter wondered. He had genuinely thought it would help her get a handle on her new life if he took her out here, far from the pressures of work and trying to adapt to her new condition. Not unlike, he realized, what Olivia had done for him when she plucked him out of Iraq what sounded like eons ago. And also, a little selfishly, he wanted her all too himself, wanted to take pleasure in the sheer presence of this extraordinary woman who had been strong enough not only to cross between universes, but also to skip timelines, simply in order to _be_ with him! He was fascinated by the beautiful power of her mind, which had been able to _dream_ him back into existence, for God’s sake, her love yanking him from the limbo in which his own little trip to the future had inevitably confined him. What had he done to be so lucky? What kind of deep connection could there be for two people to be drawn to each other so irresistibly?

Olivia was quick to catch the worry rasping in Peter’s throat when he left that last, crucial word hanging in the air—“remember?” _What exactly did she remember?_ The glowing feeling of knowing Peter better than anyone else was like a slow warm tide washing her every cell. She remembered them, no doubt about that, she too had seen what the two of them together looked like, and it was beautiful. But she did not remember _everything_ , as she had at first believed.

“Peter, I—I’m sorry,” she said in that deep voice of hers which sounded even huskier whenever she was overwhelmed by emotion. “I didn’t mean to upset you, or make you think that I’m not happy to be here. Trust me, I could not for one second think of going back to before if that meant losing you. It’s just that—that I’ve been so focused on how beautiful the two of us are together that I haven’t seen the side effects coming at me! I’ve been living in a bubble of time working on a loop. But now I can see so many parts of my life, of my lives, that I’m having a hard time piecing together. The world is hitting me in the face, Peter, and I’m afraid I won’t be strong enough, or worthy enough, to live up to my own choice, to my own life.”

“Don’t be sorry, Olivia.” He wiped a tear at the corner of her eye. “There’s no reason for you to be afraid. Whatever it is you’re going through, I’m here with you now, to help you face it. We will face this _together_ , honey. In fact, being together means exactly what we’re living through.”

“Is that a personal guarantee?” she begged, and as she asked the question, something in her own tone—or was it the way Peter was cradling her cheek in his hand again?—struck her as odd. _Haven’t we had that conversation before?_

“Absolutely!” he beamed at her. “Listen, Olivia, I know you’ve struggled alone for so long in your life that it’s difficult for you to admit it, but things are different now. _You_ are different, because you’ve accepted to stop being alone. Don’t be scared of who you’ve decided to be, Olivia.”

“I wish I could be as optimistic as you are,” she said darkly, looking back through the window.

 

They didn’t speak another word for a while, simply hugging each other at the window, the low fire burning behind them warming their backs just enough for them to stay there motionless.

And then, as the last ray of sunlight was flaring up low against the wooded slopes, snow softly started to come down. Lit up from below, each of its flakes looked surreal, transparently etched against the gathering darkness, so lightsome that they melted mid-fall like the tears of some heavenly fireflies weeping good night to this world from on high. And as this swoon of white delight steadily intensified, growing into a curtain that would soon shelter them from the night, Peter and Olivia gazed in fascinated muteness, cradling lovingly against each other. The snowfall stirred something deep in Olivia’s memory, although she could not quite place it. It was a call from some distant past that felt very different from the melancholy thoughts the view outside had elicited in her earlier on; it had a genuine ring to it, a comforting glow that made her want to shout out of pure joy even at the bottom of the dark hole into which she had been sucked. Something to do with a field of flowers at night, but it was all fuzzy, an eerie white spot in her memories of—of childhood? Which set of memories was this from? The snow felt as real and, yes, as warm as Peter’s body against hers. For the only certainty that grounded her to reality, whatever this word might have now come to mean to her, was Peter. Being with Peter, sharing Peter’s love. This felt real, _he_ felt real, like returning home to a life she had always known, deep in her heart, to be truly hers. And somehow, she did not know exactly how yet, this was connected to the snow. Had everything not started in a snowstorm? Flight 627? The explosion at the warehouses? The blanking out before she awoke into a world transformed forever? The white accumulation of cold erasing the past she had known before, bringing her into worlds parallel to this one?

_Maybe that’s why he had to bring me up here. So that I could remember the connection. And be whole again._

The logs in the fireplace hissed quietly. Olivia felt a great surge of love for Peter well up in her. She turned to look at him, and flakes of gold were swimming in the green landscape of her eyes. And once again Peter knew, looking into her eyes, he _knew_ that she was his Olivia.

“Shall we—cook?” she suggested in a hushed voice, magically managing not to break the mood. And for the first time of the day, Olivia’s sunniest smile lit up her face as she took the glass of whiskey from Peter’s hand.


End file.
